Wrapping Up a Great Road Trip

What a great trip! Two weeks on the road pirating, geeking out at roadside history, seeing friends and family and making new friends and family, and of course – selling books.

We had a blast!

Tori and a cannon at Jamestown.

And all in the company of my best friend, my wife Tori. Even on long stretches of road, late at night in odd places, we amused ourselves and just had a good time together. I always knew I made the right decision when I went up the stairs in 1988.

I’ve written about some of the things we encountered, including two posts (here and here) about what I’ve learned handling some of the book sales events. So this will be more a scattered collection of events, a last look back on some times on the road, before I get back to work moving forward.

PEOPLE

Highlight of the whole trip was the three and a half days we got with our daughter Millie. Millie lives in New York, and though we talk to her on the phone almost weekly and trade texts with her often, we hadn’t seen her in two years. That’s way too long.

We picked her up in Baltimore and headed back down the road toward Knoxville. She had brought her ukulele with her and it was great listening to her. We also met up with the granddaughter of an old friend, someone Millie had shared time with growing up, so it was a bonus.

Can’t thank enough our friends Robyn and Daniel for their hospitality. They live in Knoxville, a one-day drive from our home in New Orleans, which was the perfect staging point for our jaunt into the mid-Atlantic states. So we spent a day with them on the way out and several (including two with Millie) on the way back. They have a lovely home they’re performing miracles with. It was a relaxing way to end the trip, sitting out on the patio watching birds take turn in the bird bath, watching scores of fireflies at night.

Talk about hospitality! Spending three days in Hampton with the pirates of the Blackbeard Festival was nothing but fun, a great honor. Constable Heartless, Damon, Mr. Willis, Hope, Rattanne, Greg of the Motley Tunes, all of Blackbeard’s Crew, of course – they were excellent hosts – and the crew of the Vigilant (real life lifesavers, as it turned out) and the Loose Cannon Company and so many more.

Hampton’s Blackbeard Pirate Festival is one of the big ones in the U.S. It’s not just a community festival with a little pirate panache thrown in. It’s got some of that, of course. But the crews are serious about both pirate re-enacting and about having a good time, especially after the fireworks, when the festival is over for the day and the pirate camps come to life.

Singing, stories, more than a little drinking. Good times.

If you’ve been thinking “Maybe I’d like to go to a pirate festival” put this one on your list.

Had a great day in Frostburg, Maryland, with me niece Jenny and her husband Brian. They showed us all the sites of Frostburg, which takes most of a day and you actually have to leave Frostburg for most of it. But they’re such a great couple, it was a really nice day. But two things:

– We left Virginia Tuesday morning and the temperature was upper 80s. We got to the aptly named Frostburg that night, elevation just over 2,000 feet, and it was 52! We had not thought to bring a single long sleeved shirt! First item of business was stopping at a thrift store and getting some flannel, Don’t think it topped 62 the entire time we were there.

– Why is that whole northwestern corner of the state even IN Maryland? It has nothing in common with the rest of the state, the locals no doubt spend all their time complaining about how state government never pays any attention to them. I’m sure everyone involved would be much happier if the area were part of West Virginia, or possibly Pennsylvania. It’d be a no-lose situation.

Met with a lot of folks in front of my table full of books and I always enjoy talking with them. Some had never heard in International Talk Like a Pirate Day, others were surprised to be meeting one of the two people who started the ersatz holiday.

My two favorite were both young girls, about 14 or so, who showed up separately at the Knoxville Barnes & Noble. They both were shy, but with much coaxing from their mothers, they each allowed as how they wanted to be authors, to write stories. They asked for tips.

I didn’t give them tips, they didn’t need them. They got a pep talk, instead. Go for it. Finish what you start. You can’t fix it if you don’t write it down. Write for fun, there’s nothing like the feeling when you create characters that are as real to you as anyone you know, and put them to work telling the story you see in your head. Create great characters and then abuse them – get them in trouble, make the trouble worse, then get them out of it.

They both got copies of “Chrissie,” and I pointed out my email address on the copyright page. I want to hear from them, I told them. I want to know what they thought of the book, and how their writing is going. Because writers stick together.

AND MILES TO GO BEFORE I SLEEP

The Hotel Gunter lobby.

A lot of miles. From start to finish we traveled 3,572 miles, passing through nine states and just glancing off the side of the District of Columbia (getting snared in the Beltway travel at rush hour, easily the worst traffic of the trip.) Big disappointment – getting out of Baltimore we took the wrong exit and missed passing through the corner of Delaware. The route we took was actually shorter, but how many times do you get the chance to say, “Hi. We’re in Delaware?” (Wayne’s World” reference.) Not many. It’s one of those places where, if you don’t have a good reason to go there, you’re almost certainly never going to. And we just missed by maybe ten miles. Chances like that don’t come around that often.

A few of the many stuffed animals.

And we stayed at a wide variety of lodgings – a very wide variety. Most of them were pretty standard motels, nothing special. Three stand out, each for very different reasons.

In Frostburg, Maryland, we stayed at Failinger’s Hotel Gunter. Let me just say, if life ever takes you to Frostburg, Hotel Gunter is a MUST. It was built in 1897, has this beautiful lobby with a sweeping staircase. The whole place kind of went to the dogs and was falling down, when the Failinger family bought it in the 1980s and remodeled They found all kinds of “stuff,” and I mean every kind of stuff you could imagine – and put it on

Another random display at Hotel Gunter.

display from the basement to the fourth floor. It’s not curated, it’s just sort of there, mostly behind plexiglas. A bunch of pictures of Shirley Temple on one wall, next to a display about the Titanic. Old kitchen implements, including two cast iron stoves, a roomful of old clothes, and my favorite – the taxidermy display. Couple of dozen stuffed game animals, wild turkeys and owls and foxes and rabbits and all kinds of critters. My favorite (by far) was the dead fox carrying a dead squirrel in its mouth. Something sort of meta about that. And then, stuck in a corner as if it were almost embarrassed to be there, a stuffed toy polar bear.

Oh, and we stayed in the “Roy Clark Room.” The country music and “Hee Haw” star had stayed in the room back in 1990, and there was a picture and plaque at the door to prove it.

Hotel Gunter is such a wonderfully interesting place, bordering on the weird. The staff was friendly and proud of the place, but it was odd, like a cross between a doll house and the Hotel Overlook in “The Shining.” It was quaint and cozy and comfortable, but it would not have been a surprise to turn a corner and see a spooky pair of young twins chanting, “Come play with us.”

The Ramada in Tuscaloosa on the way home was a different story. I don’t know I’ve ever been to a motel where the staff was friendlier – it must be that Alabama thing; people in Alabama, as a group, are just the friendliest people I’ve ever met – but the hotel was in the midst of a total renovation. Our room had already been redone and was quite nice, but almost everywhere else in the building seemed to be under construction. Still, the pool was very nice, and since we’d only stopped to get off the road because we’d gotten a late start the morning before and it was starting to storm, that seemed like a huge perk.

Then there was that place in Frackville, Pennsylvania. Yes, I said Frackville. We’d finished the Wilkes-Barre signing and decided to hit the road and drive towards Baltimore until we were too tired to drive anymore that night. We should have decided to rest one stop earlier, or else soldiered on. Everything about the Frackville Econo-Lodge was dodgy, except the parts that were downright skeezy. Kind of room that reminds you of an episode of “The X-Files” or “Criminal Minds.” Still, there was a bed and a shower, it was cheap, and we were tired. It wasn’t until the next morning that we noticed that nasty stain, which we hoped and prayed was rust, running down the side of the bed’s box springs.

Anyway, we got to Baltimore in plenty of time, so I guess a motel room you don’t want to stay in – let alone sleep in – has its benefits.

GEEKING OUT AT HISTORY

Tori on the exact spot where Pocahontas married John Rolfe.

I’ve mentioned this in previous posts, but we are both history geeks. It’s hard for us to drive by a historical marker without stopping to read it. And what a gold mine. Basically, if it happened in American history, some vital part of it probably happened in Virginia. And Maryland and Pennsylvania are right behind. (Not so much Delaware.)

The highlight on that side was Jamestown, the first successful English settlement in what became the U.S. When I was a kid, about 13 or 14, we went to Jamestown as part of a vacation – except it turns out we didn’t. “Jamestown Settlement” is a recreation based on historical records, and it’s a good, educational attraction. But it’s not Jamestown. It was built a couple of miles from where the colony actually was. Until 1994 everyone assumed the land where the colonists settled had washed away a couple of hundred years ago.

Tiny dice at Jamestown.

Then a very smart archaeologist looked at the clues, looked at the terrain and said, “Wait a minute? Why are we looking there? It ought to be over here.” Turned out he was right. The actual Jamestown site is now a working archaeological dig and we got to tour it, watching college interns painstakingly lift layers of dirt from a trench and sift it for clues. We got to stand in the exact spot where Pocahontas married John Rolfe, and look at the artifacts – tools, toys, weapons and more – that tell the story of life in the settlement in the very earliest days of our country. Wow.

The remains of “Jane” were found in this excavation.

We also learned the story of “Jane” – real name and identity known but to god – a 14-year-old girl who died and was cannibalized during the “time of the great starving.” It’s a sad story and a fascinating bit of scientific/historical detective work. Tori will be using it in her sixth-grade science classes from now on. She teaches kids who are the same age Jane was when she died and was eaten. If that doesn’t get their attention and focus them on science, I don’t know what will.

Other historical stops included Harpers Ferry (where John Brown lit the fuse for the Civil War,) Yorktown, a drive-by of Williamsburg-ing (you can’t do Williamsburg in less than a day, it can’t be done. Maybe next time) and a couple of Civil War battlefields. Missed Antietam and Gettysburg, and kept groaning as we drove by Sharpsburg, Cold Harbor, Manassas, Chancellorsville and so many other names redolent with our country’s past.

And there was so much more. I didn’t even mention seeing a bear at the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, or some great meals.

NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP

After we drove Millie to the airport Tuesday, Tori and I looked at each other and said, “Home? … Home.” We had planned to finish out the week on the road, attending a pirate concert by our friends Tom Mason and Blue Buccaneer in Nashville. It would have been a great cap to the trip. But we were tired. I looked at a picture of myself from the second day of the trip, and glanced in the mirror, and I was not the same guy. At some point you want to be surrounded by your own stuff, sleep in your own bed, use your own shower. The time had come.

Besides, we still had Max and Kate at home, and even though they kept telling us on the phone that everything was fine, that they had plenty of food still, that there were no problems and they’d been cleaning the house, we wanted to get back to them. A parent worries. And besides. We like them.

So we had one more lovely day with Robyn and Daniel and headed south.

Now it’s time to get to work. Because there’s two more road trips to plan this year, plus two more book projects to finish and receipts to organize and lots more business to take care of.

But not without saying again, what a great trip that was. We had a blast!

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